


Like It or Not, Something Has To Give

by KickingDownDoors



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics), captain america: the winter soldier - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bucky Never Went To Wakanda, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety Attacks, Bonding Through Shared Trauma, Bucky Barnes Needs More Therapy, Comfort Character(s), Emotionally Traumatized Character(s), Hurt/Comfort, Mutants, Not Beta Read, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Set post 'Age Of Ultron' (2016), We Die Like Men, Werewolves, character(s) with PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 08:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29747679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KickingDownDoors/pseuds/KickingDownDoors
Summary: "What if it never goes away? What if I just stay this way forever?" I asked Barnes, my throat tight despite the burn of the whiskey.In the darkness of the summer night, he answered me. "It won't ever disappear, not really. You just got to learn to live around it."Shameless comfort writing and self-insert. You are a mutant, but only quietly. Out of sight of everyone, keeping it tucked away and restrained in the dark corners of your mind. Ever since you were young, that is what you have been taught to do. The world doesn't take kindly to werewolves just trying to earn a living, even in NYC. But sometimes it's too much, and the ropes around your mind aren't tight enough, and that scares the shit out of you because you've HURT people before. Eventually you cave and call Stark, a man you share a little past with. A man who knows your secret. And a man, you hope, will be able to solve your problem permanently.But you never accounted for Bucky fucking Barnes.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Self Insert (Friendship)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

_ I am in control.  _

_ I am in control.  _

_ I am in control.  _

_ I am in control. _

“I am in control.” I muttered to the ledge of the sink my hands were clutching. The old porcelain was dull and dirty. I really needed to clean the staff restroom more often. 

The second my thoughts strayed away from my mantra, the snarling came back. Flashing, snapping teeth in the back of my mind. Dark, coarse hair. I inhaled stiffly and tightened my grip, body tensing at the mental intrusion. 

_ I am in control.  _

“I am in control.” I repeated. “I am in control. I…” I looked up at the mirror behind the sink, and my gaze met my own bloodshot and baggy eyes, partially obscured with strands of shaggy ash-brown hair. “...am so fucking tired.”

The violent knocking on the door startled me and my heart leapt up into my mouth. After a second of rapid, panicked blinking, I croaked out a weak “... Yeah?”

“Mags, get your ass out here! We’re swamped! This ain’t the time to be taking your break.” The gruff voice of my co-worker came through the old wooden door, muffled and angry. Justifiably so. The little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant was always packed like a tin of sardines on Friday nights. Normally it was fine… but I was wearing thin. Too thin. Dangerously so.

“Yeah, just… I’ll be out in thirty seconds.” I bit back the stress in my voice and snatched a rubber band from my wrist and roughly wrangled my hair into a semi-descent ponytail. As soon as I opened the door, my co-worker was standing outside. I gave him a weak smile and he grunted in confirmation, the muscles of his face barely even moving. Together we hurried back up the half-flight up steps. 

Stepping up into the restaurant was a nightmare, the quiet of the lower level the exact opposite of the chaotic energy of the greasy, fluorescent lit, tiny kitchen. Immediately the floor manager was on me, shouting at me over the clank of frying pans and the rapid-fire communication of servers and chefs. She pressed a paper stub with three orders into my hand and was off like a shot, sweaty and greasy. Even the small rectangular windows that were all cracked open above the many stovetops brought no relief: hot inner-city summer air filtered through the screens, bringing the loud clatter and traffic of New York with it.

My grip on the slip of paper tightened and my knuckles went white. The noise felt like it was pressing down on me, pressing  _ in  _ through my ears and into my brain, grinding and whining like a dentist’s drill. Everything was too much, too loud- so I clenched my jaw hard enough to taste blood, shoving up my sleeves and elbowing my way to the sink to fill a pasta pot with water. I had to get through tonight. I needed the check, no matter how painful. I would just have to stay away from the raw meats. Couldn’t handle the smell, not now.

I was keeping myself together with duct tape and chewing gum, but damn if I couldn’t make a mean plate of baked ziti while doing so.

It was eleven o’clock at night and fifteen minutes past closing time when the foot traffic in and out of the restaurant really petered out. I was haggard and sweating, my feet aching from standing for six hours in the sweltering kitchen heat. There were burns on my wrists now: I was careless with a pan, distracted by a particularly strong thought that tried to pry my mind open. Tried to take over in a moment of forgetfulness. I could not afford to be forgetful. I had to always be focused. 

My hands found a mop and I started to clean the floors, barely noticing the way my whole body was shaking, trembling with mental exhaustion. I was half an hour from done. I was almost finished. 

“...Mags? Maggie, you with me?” The floor manager was snapping her fingers in front of my foggy eyes, a pinched and worried look on her face.  _ Was she talking to me _ ? I thought with a jolt.  _ For how long _ ?

“Sorry, sorry.” I stumbled over my words and tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “I’m just… sorry.”

My response only made her face more pinched. “You look like you’ve seen a damn ghost.” She paused, scrutinizing me with an expression that made me want to scream at her, to shove her away from me. “Jesus, Maggie, are you sick?” I didn’t even get a response out before she clapped a rough palm over my forehead. I cringed. Of  _ course  _ I had a fever. I always did, especially when I held it down too long. 

“It’s fine, really-” I began to say, dipping my mop in the bucket beside me, looking at my own warped reflection on the damp tiles. It was a haunted, sickly thing.

“Get outta here.” The manager said. She very carefully took the broom away from me, like a mother might take a knife away from a toddler. “Go on, shoo. We’re closing, anyway. Go get some sleep. And don’t even  _ think _ ,” She warned, shaking a finger at me, “Of coming back in on Friday if you’re still sick.” Then she leveled me with a stare so powerful that all I could do was weakly nod and grab my coat from the hangar. 

I don’t think I could have responded if I wanted to. As soon as she started talking, my head started pounding, unable to handle the direct onslaught of attention. I steadied myself as I tottered out the back door of the restaurant, into the empty loading area. God, it felt like my head was  _ splitting _ . With every beat of my heart,  _ it  _ banged on the front of my cranium. Wordlessly begging to be cut loose, to be allowed in. I had spent weeks,  _ months _ , keeping it back: running cardio so hard I couldn’t think, drinking black coffee when the dreams got too strong, turning back to medication when the coffee didn’t cut it. But I was only one person. 

My feet only got me as far as the chain link fence in the far back before I slid downwards, back to the fencepost. I didn’t know if I could make it to my car. Didn’t know if I could make it through  _ traffic _ , even, in order to get home and lock myself away. I wasn’t sure the door to my subterranean apartment could hold me back anymore. 

With every sickening realization the world felt smaller and smaller and my breathing became faster and faster. I was suddenly aware of how many warm, living bodies were close to me: in looming apartments looking down on me, in restaurants, on the streets that boxed me in. New York was a sprawling and infinite metropolis in all directions: and there was  _ so much  _ damage I could do within it. 

I was paralyzed, hyperventilating and holding the floodgates closed so hard on my mind, it took almost all my concentration. I didn’t have a choice now. Because of my stupid, idiotic decision to pretend like my mutation didn’t exist, like if I ignored it it would go away, I didn’t have a choice. I had to call him. Had to get help again. I pulled out my phone and punched in the number I knew from memory. It only rang twice before it picked up. 

“Hi, first question, lemme just get it out of the way. How the hell did you get this number?” A man’s cocky, irritated voice said on the other end of the line. 

“Stark, it’s me. Uh, it’s- it’s Mags.” I replied hoarsely.

There was a long-suffering sigh and the sound of a fridge door closing, followed by the pop of a beer bottle. “Mags, Mags, Mags.” Tony Stark tutted in that frustrating, pompous way of his. “I thought we fixed this problem ages ago. Those meds work fine. You  _ are  _ taking the meds, right?”

“They were, they were.” I was struggling not to choke up. God, I hated how scared this made me. How scared  _ I  _ made me. “But they’re- they’re not working any more. I don’t know what to do.”

“Look, kid, I’m not your therapist.” He responded dryly.

“Stark .” I said more severely. I slipped up, the panic clogging my throat filtering into my voice, and I pressed my back into the dirty chain fence hard enough for it to bite into my shoulders. The other end of the line got very uncharacteristically quiet. “I’m… you  _ know  _ I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t… if it wasn’t an emergency. I haven’t been able to get out of the city in  _ months _ , I thought I could handle it alone, thought I could just take the meds and everything would be fine, but. But Tony, now I’m hiding in a parking lot and I can’t leave because as soon as I get up I  _ know  _ it’s going to happen, and I’m  _ fucking terrified _ . I could hurt  _ so many  _ people.” A single tear dripped down my shaking face. 

More silence at the end of the line. Then Tony snapped into action. “I’ve got your location right now.” He said. His voice had morphed from sarcastic billionaire playboy into the sharp, clipped tone of a professional who knew he was playing with fire. “I’m sending a car from one of my local offices. A black coupe. I’m bringing you someplace safe, alright?”

_ Safe for everybody else _ , I thought miserably to myself. 

“Did you hear me, Maggie? I’m gonna need confirmation, here.”

“I- I heard you.”

“Think you can hold on for a few more hours? Answer me honestly.”

“If it’s quieter,” I replied stiffly, squeezing my eyes shut as a particularly large intrusion tried to force its way into my head. “If I can focus more on keeping it in.”

“That’s good, that’s good. I’m bringing you to me, okay? You just focus on staying you.”

It only felt like a blink, a handful of seconds, before the sleek black car rolled into the lot. I opened my squeezed shut eyes and took a few seconds to hype myself, to take some steadying breaths. I was getting out of here, I was going somewhere  _ safe _ , somewhere I could be managed if I lost control. The inside of the car was blissfully silent and tinted as I slid into it, and the driver gave me little more than a nod in the rear-view before speeding back into the city streets. A sick, worried thought crossed my mind: I wondered how much force the partition glass separating us could handle. And how many times I would smash myself against it until it gave way. 

_ I am in control.  _

_ I am in control.  _

_ I am in control.  _

No speed bump or blaring horn could shake me from my mantra. I didn’t dare open my eyes, even when the stop-and-start traffic of the city gave way to roaring highway, and when highway gave way to quiet upstate country roads. My old, ratty jacket was bundled in my lap, and I held big fistfuls of it like it was a lifesaver and I was a drowning victim. 

_ I am in control.  _

_ I am in control.  _

I mouthed along to the words. The teeth and glinting eyes in my cranium bayed desperately, pleading for freedom. 

Only when the car rolled to a stop and the driver cleared his throat did I open my eyes. My shoulders immediately sagged in relief. Inside the walls of the fabled Avengers Compound was one of the safest places in the world to be: at least here, if I went full-nuclear, I wouldn’t tear through thirty civilians before police finally put enough bullets in me to actually take me down. By now it was one o’clock at night, and floodlights lit the sprawling green turf and towering concrete buildings. The silver Avenger ‘A’ shimmered in the white beam of light. In front of me stood the smaller building on the land, led up to by a wide concrete roundabout, and ending hanging over the waters of the Hudson. 

And ambling out of the massive glass-and-chrome entrance, backlit by the lights, was the man himself, Tony Stark. I gave him the only smile I could muster as I exited the car: weak and watery as I shielded my eyes from the light. 

“You look like shit, kid.” He said. His eyes were tired. 

“I feel like shit.” I replied. 

He didn’t make a move to come closer. He’d figured out that was a mistake last time we had met: _it_ didn't like its personal space crowded. “What’s the fire risk today, Smokey?”

“Looking very high.” He was making a joke, but I didn’t have the mental elasticity right now to play along enough to laugh. “Can we just- can we just go, please? Back to the same place as last time?” I liked the last place. I couldn’t break anything in there. And right now it felt like my head was one big ringing gong: I didn’t know much much longer I could keep it together. Minutes, at the most.

With a sweep of his arm, Tony ushered me in the massive glass doors. I probably could have appreciated it more: the echo of my footsteps inside the massive and futuristic building, the privilege of even being allowed  _ into _ a place so many people would sell their soul just to glimpse, but I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about it right now. We made a beeline for the elevator and shuffled inside, the magnets it ran on making my stomach drop as we descended at lightning speed. 

We stopped unexpectedly at the wrong floor, and the doors opened. I looked up at Tony, tense with fear and not understanding. Didn’t he get that we were on a  _ time limit _ ? When the doors opened, I saw a very tired looking doctor Banner holding a tablet in one hand and a ceramic mug in the other. He caught sight of us- of  _ me _ \- and blanched. 

“Trust me,” Tony said dryly, tapping the close button, “Get the next one.” When we started moving again he spoke up once more, not looking in my direction. “He’s scared of you, you know. You remind him of himself.”

I was too tired to respond. 

Finally,  _ finally _ , we arrived at the lowest level. A containment area, hundreds of feet under the earth and built out of concrete and reinforced plexiglass. We walked the narrow concrete hall up to the door, and into the observation room. I already knew where I was going, walking through the two security checkpoints as Tony buzzed me through. As soon as I was on the other side of them, I let out a long, loud sigh of relief. I made it. I was  _ safe _ . 

“I’ll go get you a change of clothes. We’ll talk in the morning.” Tony said through the intercom. I gave him a weak thumbs-up through the one-way window that divided the observation room from the gargantuan, hulk-proofed holding room. 

The ropes I used every hour of the day to bind my mind, to focus, to keep  _ together _ , were burning me. Chafing together, weakening. Strands of their fiber snapping with awful sounds, like a broken violin. And as the high buzzing of the ceiling fluorescents and the blessed silence of the dozens of meters of concrete surrounding me finally registered, I let them break. Let them fall away and burn.

With sagging shoulders and tired, baggy eyes, I relaxed my grip on the monster’s leash. 

* * *

Tony watched the change from behind the thick glass, his arms folded and a crease of tension between his eyebrows. One moment there was an exhausted, underweight, worried slip of a twenty-something year old in the containment room. Then her back snapped backwards in a terrifying, poltergeist-type way: she morphed in less than a second. Wiry brown-black fur exploded outwards, bursting out of her skin like a macabre firework, and a nine foot tall, nine hundred pound shaggy wolf stood in her stead, surrounded by shredded clothing. Her head was lean and low, her coat ragged and long. The wolf’s legs were long and powerful, each toe tipped with a heavy, deadly claw. 

She was a monster. A mutant, a word that Wade Wilson had helpfully supplied as he was getting thrown out of the city. Tony watched the gargantuan, almost prehistoric creature assess her surroundings with a slow sort of self-assurance in her own power, amber-brown eyes as big as tennis balls. He could hear every footfall as she ever so slowly started circling the perimeter of the room. When she got to the front, the head was perfectly level with the elevated windows. And Tony swore she could see him, even through the one-way tint: she stared at him right through the glass with a cold, piercing gaze. The gaze of a hunter. 

When he had first met Maggie, she was wounded and snapping and snarling, fighting off Chitauri in a grimy alleyway in downtown NYC. Alien blood streaked her massive, dark muzzle, and her own red blood matted her sides. Tony’s first response at that point had been a hearty ‘ _ what the fuck’ _ , and to immediately put the ‘giant monster wolf’ lower on the priority list than ‘alien invasion’. Only after the dust had well and truly settled did he circle back to it. After a tense moment consisting of him in his full Iron Man suit, Clint crouched on a car with an explosive arrow notched, and a large canine snarling in the middle of the road, Maggie had fainted from blood loss. Tony would have probably had the wolf heli-carried out of the city and given to the remaining trustworthy fragments of SHIELD had she not morphed back into a wounded and nude woman lying in the dust and rubble of the downtown. 

But that was the past. Tony eyed the wolf for a few more seconds, put his hands in his pants pockets, and started heading for the elevator door. Pepper was a sympathetic woman, but he knew if he tried to go back up to their room right now, the door would be locked. He couldn’t fault her for wanting at least one night of solid sleep. 


	2. Chapter 2

I awoke with a jolt a mystery amount of hours later to the sound of the security doors being buzzed open. Thankfully, I found myself curled up behind one of the few hulk-sized pieces of soft furniture in the room: this one being a large baby-blue beanbag. I quickly rubbed the sand out of my eyes, looking sharply over at the figure who had entered the room.

It was one of the Avenger’s many compound employees. She was dressed in a freshly-pressed black suit, and folded over her arm was a pair of grey sweatpants and matching sweatshirt. She set the bundle down on the concrete floor on the opposite side of the room and put a lanyard with a keycard on top. “It’s nine thirty in the morning. Mr. Stark said you’re welcome up at the domestic level whenever you feel you’re safe enough to do so.” She said in a detached, professional manner. Without waiting for a reply she glided out of the room, leaving the massive security doors open. 

Once I was positive she was gone, I took mental stock of myself. Naked, of course. A side effect of harboring a nightmarishly-large wolf inside of my body: my clothes tended not to fit the canine. I tentatively probed the back of my mind: the creature seemed satiated, for the time being. Having stretched its legs a bit, it was no longer slamming itself against the gates of my psyche. At least for a little while, I didn't have to focus as hard on not letting it up and out. 

I slunk across the room, wincing at the cold concrete on my feet, and wriggled into the sweats. The keycard was laminated and caught the light: it read ‘security access 3’ on the front. After a futile and short fight with my hair to try and get it to look like I hadn’t slept on the floor like a feral woman, I awkwardly slunk out of the room and scanned my card at the elevator door, punching the third floor button and walking across the sky bridge that connected the main building to one of the smaller ones, closer to the water. As I made my uncomfortable way to the more casual area of the compound, I avoided the eyes of anyone I passed. The compound was full of professionals: government workers, weapons experts, and even foreign diplomats. The Avengers were a global superpower, after all. And I knew what I must look like in the eyes of all those I passed: an oily, scared, raccoon-looking woman with no shoes and a nervous aura. It was a miracle nobody stopped me.

It was a little easier to breathe when I took the steps up to the large glass-walled communal kitchen, closer to the end of the compound. I rounded a corner and looking at the massive room before me. It was part professional kitchen and part lounge, with one of the walls being a massive assemblage of panels that overlooked the Hudson. Only now did I realize that those windows were streaked with rain: the grey sky outside was dumping a summer storm down on the base and the surrounding forest. The rain roared dully on the roof.

“It’s Friday morning, lighten up.” I heard Tony’s voice echo through the room as I padded further in. I saw the tech genius facing away from me, talking to very unimpressed looking Natasha Romanoff who was dressed to the absolute nines in a blouse and pencil skirt. 

“You’re gonna burn your liver out completely before fifty, Stark.” She said, crossing her arms. Her voice was raspy and comfortable, like cocoa. My pace slowed when I saw her: I wasn’t only familiar with her like every other American citizen was, from merchandise and television interviews. We had history. She had very openly threatened to put a bullet between my eyes if she suspected I was even  _ thinking  _ about transforming, all those years ago when Tony initially brought me back to Stark Tower for study. 

Despite that, I had a little bit of a crush on her. 

“Ugh. You sound just like Rogers.” Tony chided. He poured a little bit more whiskey into his glass of orange juice just to spite her. 

“Your funeral.” She replied. Ever so casually her gaze slid over to me. Her expression was neutral and inscrutable, like she was completely uninvested in the situation. 

I, however, upon seeing her brilliant green eyes lock with mine, stumbled in my gait. My bare feet squeaked on the polished floor, and it echoed in the lounge. 

Tony turned around just as Natasha shouldered her bag and sauntered away through the other hallway. He leaned against the kitchen island and smiled at me. “Well, if it isn’t man’s best big murderous friend.” He took a sip of his considerably alcoholic breakfast drink. 

I held back a long-suffering sigh. There was no doubt how unbelievably appreciative I was for everything that Stark had done for me, but on the other hand, I really couldn’t stand the man. “Listen, Tony… Mr. Stark. Thank you so much for doing that for me the other night. I really- I really appreciated it.” I paused, uncomfortably wiping my hands on the sides of my sweatpants. “... So, just point me in the direction of the compound gates and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Tony’s brow furrowed. “Oh, I see. Common misconception, that I’d want you out of here as soon as possible. But no.” He paused to take another sip, and then gestured at me with a finger. “ _ You  _ are going to stay here until I can completely and fully understand your little wolfy shtick, and until we find a way to somewhat mitigate the chance that you’ll go full rambo and eat a whole city block.”

My mouth opened and closed like a fish. “No, really,” I finally got out, “Not necessary. I’ll come up with my own solution. I’ve been in your hair for way too long, anyways, I’m sure you have work to do-”

“Nope.” Tony accentuated the word with a pop of his lips and an open-palmed slap of the granite island. “Cleared my schedule. As long as nothing tries to immediately jeopardize the safety of the planet, this is my top priority now. Besides, you have  _ no  _ idea how bananas other companies would go when they learned you have the ability to turn into a raging death machine at will. Best to just let me figure it out instead.”

“Believe me, I do have some idea.” I muttered before speaking up louder. “I just… Tony, I have work. I’ve already taken two sick leaves this month on days I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it. I can’t afford another one. I might get fired.”

“What’s your restaurant’s phone number? I’ll call ‘em.” Tony was already pulling up his phone. 

“What?! No!” I balked, skittering over to him with a horrified expression and pushing his phone away from his typing fingers. “You can’t do that, seriously.”

He steamrolled right over me. “I think it was something like Bollatelli’s? Botalinni’s? Either way, the Avengers calling you in for a consultation is a universal free pass.”

“Which is  _ exactly  _ what I’m afraid of!” I finally yanked hard enough on his phone that he looked down at me with a frown, like you might look at a two year old child who was babbling nonsense. I tried to straighten my thoughts out, and took a deep, collective breath. “If you call that in, my manager  _ will  _ excuse me, but she’ll also freak out. Everyone,  _ everyone _ on the staff is gonna know. And that means questions. Lots and lots of invasive questions that require well-thought-out and careful answers and lies that I don’t have the mental bandwidth for ninety percent of the time, because I’m focusing on not turning into a giant wolf and causing a mass panic!”

Tony opened his mouth to retort with something smart, but seemed to think better of it, gaze flickering from my dark-ringed eyes and the thin, angry set of my lips. “Okay, you’ve made your point. You call them.” He paused to stretch and huff, looking around the room. “Right, yeah. You,” He pointed at me and then at the sleek silver fridge in the kitchen, “make yourself some breakfast. And I know what you’re thinking: don’t worry, we’ll do calorie burning tests later to see if there is a significant energy absorption difference to generate your whole other Mr. Hyde. For now, just take this-” He tossed a small grey device at me and I barely managed to catch it, “- and click the button on the side every time the wolf nudges you from the inside. I wanna start collecting data.”

I looked at the innocuous-looking little LED-faced device in my hand, turning my gaze back up to ask Tony just how long he expected to keep me here for tests, but he was already chattering away to a hologram of FRIDAY. He picked up a whole pot of coffee and headed out of the room, already lost in diagrams and depictions of canine DNA genomes. 

“Right.” I said faintly to myself in an empty room. “Okay, right.” I had about a million different anxieties and worries and questions right now. They were all interrupted by a sharp, twisting stab of hunger reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since before my last shift at around five. Breakfast really did sound like a good idea: if anything, it would help distract me a little bit from the ever-present anxiety of knowing the wolf was now resting, recuperating, and would soon be bashing at the front gates of my mind once again. 

I got the call to work out of the way first. My manager’s voice was practically oozing ‘I told you so’ when I told her I was sick. When I hung up, I rested my forehead against the cool marble of the countertop and spent a few seconds trying to suppress the urge to scream into a pillow like a teenager.

Tony Stark’s kitchen was  _ loaded _ . All the fancy cooking equipment and high-quality ingredients a gal could ask for. I opened cabinet after cabinet. Tony  _ did  _ say to make myself anything I wanted, and given that he runs a multi-billion-dollar company, he should really have the basic smarts to know you never invite a professional cook into your kitchen unless you want to get completely cleaned out. I opened another small drawer and sighed dreamily, pulling out a rich and expensive bar of Fortunato No. 4, the world’s premier (and priciest) chocolate. 

Like a gift from god, a vision of fluffy Belgian waffles with dark chocolate, strawberries, and toffee sauce drifted through my head. There weren’t a lot of things I could do in life without losing my cool and breaking my ever-present focus. But cooking was one of them. 

Soon the kitchen was alive, and I was in my element. Ingredients sat scattered around the counter as I added little chunks of butter to the stand mixer, hunting around for the dry yeast and making a noise of satisfaction when I found it, dipping my measuring spoons into it. 

I was feeling good. I only had to click Tony’s device three times so far. 

“Now where the hell…” I looked in the drawer I found the stand mixer in, but found no dough hook. I started rooting through the futuristic kitchen again. Spatula, whisker, butter baster, but no dough hook. “You better not make me mix this by hand.” I growled to nobody in particular. I yanked open another cabinet and looked through its suspended racks of cookware with a frustrated and furrowed brow. 

It took me a few seconds to realize that I could see through the wire racks. And that through the wire racks, I could see a hulking figure standing between the lounge and the kitchen. I jerked around with a start, heart rapidly thumping and sweat prickling on my hands.  _ Teeth in my head, danger and fear, a flash of grey fur _ . I clicked the device. 

There was a man standing motionless, watching me. He was quiet as a mouse: I hadn’t even heard him come in. He was dressed in a casual hoodie and black pants with running shoes, and his hair was so long it tickled his shoulders: but that wasn’t what had flung me into a panic, what was  _ still  _ making me freeze in fear. It was his eyes. He looked… dead. Lightless and emotionless, with no hidden pain or confusion at finding me here. At most, he just looked hauntingly tired. 

The silence of our standstill dragged on for what felt like hours. 

“... I’m allowed to be here.” I hazarded, pinching my lanyard and holding my security pass up. “I’m, uh… a guest of Tony Stark?”

More silence. The guy finally showed an emotion: dispassionate confusion. All it made him do was slightly furrow his brow. 

Somehow, miraculously, the hand I still hand on the open wire rack found a dough hook: I pulled it down, the victory soured by this weird pseudo-standoff. I tried one last time to pull myself out of the terse confrontation. “... I’ll be heading back to Stark in a minute, but. I’m making myself some breakfast now. Belgian waffles. If you want in, there’s gonna be extra.”

After watching the titan of a man continue to not move for several more seconds (and after the acid in my stomach gaze me a particularly sharp ripple of hungry pain), I risked just going back to cooking, attaching the hook and plopping the dough in, moving to start prepping my caramel sauce on the stovetop. Just as I started to stir the warming sugar, the man started walking up to me and I froze, and  _ teeth and eyes and fear _ , and I pressed the button on the device  _ click click click _ , and _ dear god  _ that man is a scary looking-

He brushed right past me and opened the fridge, pulling out a protein shake in a plastic bottle and leaving as quickly as he came without even a word in my direction. 

My toffee nearly burned and I jumped to take it off the flame. Even after he left, the air in the room felt cold. I shivered. There was nothing  _ physically  _ strange about him, sure: it was more the way his presence made the hairs on my arms stand up, and filled the room with a crackling, eerie sense of discomfort. The dog inside of my head was still rankled and uneasy, pacing about the back of my mind like it sensed a threat. 

The Belgian waffles were beautiful and delicious and the  _ perfect  _ ratio of salty toffee to sweet fluffy batter to fresh and bright strawberry, but the victory of a photo-worthy breakfast was sullied with the unease of the idea that that man was creeping around the compound, and of whatever weird nightmarish tests Tony already had in store for me. I forced down the rest of the perfectly golden-brown, chocolate speckled waffle, because it was too good to waste. The others I had made got boxed up in plastic containers with even smaller containers of toffee syrup and fresh whipped cream beside them.

“Never let it be said I’m anything but a thoughtful cook.” I remarked to nobody, shutting the fridge door. 

Right as I was finishing washing the last pan, the intercom on the wall pinged. “Requesting little miss canine to the mad science lab on floor four of building A, please.” Tony’s dry and smug tone wafted through the air. I set the pan down on the drying rack with a suspicious thunk: that was a little too conveniently timed. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he had assigned someone to watch me, or even several: if I was in his shoes, I wouldn’t even have let me out of my cell. I could seriously hurt someone, left to my own devices. 

_ Teeth and heavy breathing and eyes _ . I clicked the device and stole one final tablespoon full of whipped cream before putting my hands in my sweat pockets and quickly heading for building A. The fewer people I came in contact with, the better. I hated the way they looked at me.


	3. Chapter 3

“So they’re really not working anymore? Not at all?” Tony asked me. It was the third time in ten minutes had had badgered me about my medication while he was tying up my arm with a band and sticking a needle inside of it to draw blood. I had to look away: not because I was squeamish about blood, but because I was going to have to click the device many more times if I saw it. The wolf was a feral bastard.

“Would I be here if they were?” I replied dryly. The lights of the medical research room were painfully bright and white. I narrowed my eyes and took comfort in the one part of the room that wasn’t sterile and futuristic, the stormy window overlooking the broad lawns of the compound. “They just became… less and less effective as time went on. A  _ lot  _ less effective lately.”

“That tracks, considering I had the pharmaceutical company half the dose strength.”

“Wh- you  _ what _ ?!” I risked a look towards my bleeding arm to burn my gaze into Tony. 

He put his hand up defensively, a pair of scissors and a little plastic baggie in his grip. “Can you blame me? Kid, we haven’t talked in  _ years _ . Not since the invasion. I figured since you weren’t breaking down the tower’s door for help, and there were no city-wide reports of a giant wolf roaming the streets, that you had gotten it under control.” He paused to unceremoniously snip a few strands of my hair and drop them into the bag, tossing it onto the nearest table. “Besides, making that stuff is expensive. The only other person on my payroll who needs it is Banner, and even he only takes it occasionally. But whatever, past is the past, time to find a permanent solution.”

I didn’t know how I felt about the fact that the Hulk and I were on the same emotional suppressants, but it certainly didn’t feel  _ good _ . It really didn’t conjure up any faith in finding a new medication, considering the Hulk was still quite frequently the Hulk. 

Then Tony was blathering on and on about a quick CT scan, wheeling a large circular device over and slotting it in place. I paled a little at the sight of the machine, and stiffened up in my reclined position on the table. “Who, uh…” I said to distract myself as Tony fussed with the dials and turned the scanner on with a menacing hum. He put a hand on my shoulder and pressed me back against the table: I let him, and clicked the device again.  _ Teeth and bunched muscles and anger _ . “Who’s tall, dark, and angry? He teleported into the kitchen today when I was making breakfast.” I paused, thinking back to that angular, stubble-covered face framed by dark hair. “He creeped me out.”

The machine whirred to life and began slowly scanning down my body, pulling the medical table through the hole, inch by inch. Nearby, Tony sighed at my question, looking away and muttering something to himself along the lines of ‘ _ told him to just stay out of the way’ _ . “He,” Tony explained, “Is nobody you need to bother yourself with. One of Cap’s old friends, and a walking, talking pillar of problems that has been dumped in my lap for me to solve. Just don’t go out of your way to bother him and you’ll be fine.”

The machine was by my feet now, and it might have just been placebo, but I swore I could feel the rays tingling on my skin, shooting through my flesh. Tony was looking for something, and considering that something was a nearly-thousand-pound behemoth, I hoped to god that he didn’t find it under my skin. “... Is he dangerous?”

He opened his mouth to respond, and I could see the gears suddenly shift tracks in his head. “No,” He said smoothly as he turned the machine off. “Just moody.” He busied himself with asking FRIDAY to pull up the scans of my body, leaning against a nearby table as he flicked through them. 

“You’re lying to me.” I replied. 

Tony only paused his examinations for a second before he continued looking, but it was all the confirmation I needed. “I gotta tell you, kid, you’re weird.” He switched topics and blew up one of the fresh scans on his holographic screen. All I could see were different hues of blues and white, and the occasional identifiable bone, like a pelvis. “We  _ really  _ should have scanned you a few years ago.”

“There’s a reason I didn’t want you to. I was afraid of something like  _ this  _ happening. But now here we are anyways.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Tony continued to talk like he hadn’t heard me, “But even  _ I  _ know these internal lesions shouldn’t be here.” He widened a section of the x-ray, the blue light of the hologram reflecting off the nearby medical equipment. “Jesus, are those teeth? Underneath your deltoids?”

A buzz of panic flickered through me, and I brought a hand up to my shoulder, cupping it through the thick fabric of my sweatshirt. What did he mean, lesions? Fucking  _ teeth _ ?  _ I knew it,  _ I thought to myself, panicking,  _ I always fucking knew it. It’s not a curse. It’s inside of me. It’s fucking inside of me, my body _ . 

“This honestly looks like something out of a straight to DVD horror movie. That tendon definitely shouldn’t be next to your stomach. It’s not even  _ human. _ ”

_ I am in control.  _

I didn’t fucking  _ feel  _ in control. The panic rose higher as I took in everything Tony was saying. Folds of flesh where there shouldn’t be. Tufts of wiry fur, trapped between the fibers of my muscles. Teeth under my skin and bones. I clicked the device.  _ I am in control.  _

_ “ _ Oh my bad, those aren’t teeth, they’re claws. Looks like they’re actually physically connected through the arterial-”

“Stop.” I ground out, swinging my legs off the medical table. The tile floor under my feet was icy and I didn’t care. I was sweating fucking bullets. “I- I can’t hear about this.”

Tony pulled his head back slightly. Very subtly he shifted again, from self-assured physics professor to wary combatant. “...Are we gonna have a problem, Maggie?” He asked very calmly, evaluating my tense shoulders and the way my fingernails dug into my palms. He was probably wondering how fast he could summon his suit to him if I went full ‘American Werewolf in London’. 

“No, I just… no.”  _ Deep, steadying breaths _ . I brought air in through my nose and blew it out in a narrow stream through my lips, doing my best to not think about the hellish, fleshy monstrosity underneath my skin. “I just need a breather. Maybe a quick walk, get myself refocused.”

“I’m just gonna be blunt here: are you  _ stable  _ enough to be alone right now?”

I tried to not let the question prickle me as much as it did, fighting off a wave of irritation and self-loathing that rolled over me. “Yeah. I’ll be fine. I just want some space, then I’ll be back, promise.” Without waiting for an answer I shoved my hands in my sweats pockets and took off out the door, trying to put as much distance as I could between myself and those scan images.

The compound’s buildings were big, but intuitively built: it was easy enough to find myself walking back down the skybridge and into the quieter, more lived-in buildings closer to the water. I walked through the kitchen lounge and was soothed by the sound of rain on the rooftop: my pace slowed as I walked down the hall into the living spaces. I passed a comfortable looking reading room and a library, as well as a cocktail bar room with a massive television taking up one whole wall. I went down a flight of stairs that curled in on itself, eventually coming to a ground floor. The glass wall of this particular room looked out on one of the smaller side-lawns of the compound, boxed in by woods and out of sight of the other military-looking buildings. Despite being small, it was still roughly half the size of a football field. The sight relaxed me: it was just endless, torrential rain pouring down over green foliage. No beeping CT scanners, no uncomfortable revelations. 

I crossed the small entryway and let my forehead rest against the cool glass of the window next to door, exhaling and letting myself sag a little. I’d been myself again for all of two hours and I was already feeling that endless, relentless shoving in the front of my mind. Just like that, I was back to holding the wolf inside.

“There goes my free time.” I muttered against the glass. My hand found Tony’s device inside my pocket. I clicked it. The rainstorm continued to roar. 

Then something in the back of the room shifted, rasping like fabric on fabric. I snapped my head around and stepped back from the window like it had burned me. 

Sitting in the chair in the furthest corner of the room, as silent as last time, was 'the guy'. His jacket was now soaked in sweat and rain, and the black ball cap that sat over his damp hair was just as wet. The running shoes on his feet were covered in mud from a recent run on the compound track. He took a quiet sip from his protein shake, staring at me. 

_ Confrontation, angry, teeth and lifted lips, DANGER _ . I clicked the device again in my pocket as we continued to uneasily stare at one another. A weird, dark, tortured energy practically wafted off him and across the room: it made the canine inside me uneasy, less controllable. I couldn’t help but wonder if he got the exact same vibe from me. 

When he took another drink, I finally noticed the arm. It was covered in a long jacket sleeve and a fingerless exercise glove, but the plates and bands of metal still shimmered: I finally realized that the almost imperceptible whirring sound I had heard earlier wasn’t from the air conditioning, but the man. Even under the grime of his clothing, the augmentation was apparent.

The air in the room felt jarred when he finally broke the silence. “You know who I am, you can just say it. Get it over with.” His voice was low and gravelly, like he had gargled nails, and his tone was just upset enough to not be completely apathetic. 

“...I don’t, actually. Sorry.” I admitted honestly. I'm sure that, considering he lived here, he was some bigshot, but I was coming up with nothing. I paused, biting the inside of my cheek; Tony specifically told me not to talk to this guy. “I know you Avengers types are used to everyone knowing you... but I don’t get out much.”

The bottle halted at his lips, and he made a huffing sound that would easily be mistaken for a smothered laugh if his mouth had shown any hint of a smile at all. But it didn’t. He looked back at me with those deadened, icy eyes. “That’s probably a good thing.”

Another beat of silence filled only by the muffled rain. 

“I’m, uh, Maggie.” I fidgeted with my security pass idly. After another few seconds of quiet, I half-heartedly closed off my sentence. “And… you are…?”

The man looked like he would rather be getting teeth pulled than continue this conversation. “Barnes.” He finally said stiffly. He stood up from his seat and started to slowly walk towards the stairwell on the opposite side of the room, towards the rest of the compound. I was quietly relieved that he was leaving. 

A distant grumble of thunder rolled across the forest. 

_ Open space, mud underneath massive paws, heavy breathing and sprinting through the rain _ . My hand grabbed the handle of the door almost without realizing it. “No.” I hissed aloud. There was no way in  _ hell  _ I was going out there, especially now that I knew what the wolf  wanted. 

As if in rebuttal, the wolf pressed against my mind again.  _ Eyes and teeth, muscle burning with exertion, thunderclaps and panting jaws _ . I made a pained noise at the intrusive thought and brought a free hand up to my temple: that particular push was almost painful. “No. Absolutely not!” I said more severely. The wolf was wild but it was still a canine, and the canine within me saw mud and a wide-open space and wanted nothing but to use  _ all  _ its energy to run around in it, to feel alive. 

“...Do you… need a doctor?” A voice came down from the stairs. In the corner of my eye I saw Barnes, half-turned back to look at me with an inscrutable expression. His words were stilted, like he was only saying them out of a duty to be a good Samaritan, and not because he actually cared.

_ God, how fucking mortifying _ , I thought to myself,  _ another person who’s going to look at me like I’ve grown a second head _ . “No. I… sorry.” My apology was reflexive, at this point. “I just- want to go out right now. But I can’t.” The wolf dug deeper into my psyche, angry at having its requests denied, and I winced again. My nail dug into my forehead.

Barnes grunted on the stairwell, paused, and slowly started tromping back down. 

I pulled back a bit, temporarily forgetting about my predicament to wonder just why the hell he was getting closer and closer to me. 

“Can’t leave…” He said, trying to explain something. He shouldered past me and pressed his thumb to the door’s ID lock before I could stop him, and kicked it open with his foot. The sound of rain increased tenfold and fresh air flooded the room. “... Because your security clearance isn’t high enough. Mine is.”

I watched the door open almost in slow motion, horror dawning on my face. He didn’t know it, but Barnes had just doomed me. 

“Goddammit, Barnes.” I barely got out, my voice faint. I pulled with all my might against the reins in my mind, trying to hold the door to the cage closed, but the wolf was frenzied: against my own will I took three hurried steps outside into the rain, fell to my hands and knees, and morphed. 

* * *

The woman beside him cursed him out, dashed into the rain, and collapsed. Bucky Barnes’ eyes widened in shock and he automatically reached out to grab her by the collar and pull her up. 

He never got the chance. Like a bomb, her body exploded outwards in a blur of fur and limbs, bigger than he had ever seen before. He reared back in reaction to it, hunkering inside the doorway, the knife from his ankle strap already in his hand. He had never seen an animal that fucking big in his  _ life _ . 

But then it was off like a shot in the other direction, a gigantic blur of black against the grey of the heavy rain. It ran out across the field, and then around the perimeter. Around and around in wandering, looping circles. Chunks of turf and mud were torn up and flung behind its massive paws as its powerful legs moved it across the compound like a battering ram of muscle. Its dark head turned to him, and he knew, he  _ knew  _ it could see him even hundreds of meters away and through sheets of rain. Barnes didn’t move a muscle. He stared straight back, his grip on his knife tight. He needed a better weapon. Stark told him he didn’t need weapons here, that he was safe. Now he knew the man had been lying to him. 

Only after the wolf seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat, and resumed gleefully running across the open field, did Barnes let loose a quiet, “What the fuck.”

* * *

“I just need some air,” Stark said, mocking the voice of the young woman. “I’ll be back in a moment, I promise. Bull _ shit _ .” He was staring out the window of the medical bay with his arms crossed, a finger in his mouth as he bit his cuticle. Below him, half-obscured by the roof of another building and wet with summer rain, was the compound’s smaller grass lot. And tearing across it in large circles like an exuberant dog, was a massive wolf.

His phone rang and he picked it up immediately. “Do I see- yeah, of  _ course  _ I see it.” He squinted out harder at the wolf through the glass. “You’re head of fucking security, I thought you were supposed to catch this sort of thing before it happened. Didn’t I specifically tell you to keep  _ multiple  _ pairs of eyes on her? Banner protocols here, man!” He paused to listen to the chattering on the other end. “What- no,  _ no _ , god, absolutely not. I’ve seen her when she’s scared, she’ll tear through half of the compound’s security team before you put enough tranquilizers in her to take her down.”

Tony turned away from the window, looking at the CT scans. A wolf, compressed inside a woman. But there was still a human woman in there, somewhere. “I’ll talk her down.” He eventually said. The other end of the line exploded with protests. “No, no, no, I’m the fund-provider for this whole operation  _ and  _ your employer, I get to make the final call.  _ Yes,  _ I will bring the pocket sound canon with me, Jesus. I swear sometimes you remind me of my mother.”

He hung up and shrugged out a jacket, jogging out of the room to the elevators, now very glad that he had the foresight to send out a faculty-wide email this morning disclosing the potential danger his latest experiment could bring to the table. At least now the groundskeepers wouldn’t be  _ too  _ shocked when they saw a half-ton wolf barrel past them. Tony was  _ not  _ looking forward to having to justify that to the fellows at OSHA. 

The elevator dinged, and he descended.


	4. Chapter 4

Tony walked down the steps two at a time, calibrating the mini sonar canon attached to his arm and rolling his loose dress shirt sleeve down over it. “What can you tell me, FRIDAY?” He asked the compound around him. 

“She’s moving too fast for in-depth scans, sir,” FRIDAY’s clipped voice answered, shifting from speaker to speaker as the man navigated the hallways, “but preliminary data shows an elevated heart rate and dilated pupils. Out of aggression or exuberance, it’s unclear.”

Tony nodded to himself, grabbing a large towel off a laundry cart a man was pushing to the private living quarters of the base’s permanent residents. He passed a woman staring out a window into the small yard below, her mouth agape in horror at the large monster that was currently trotting circles in the muddied earth. 

“What, you’ve never seen a case of the zoomies before?” Tony said rhetorically as he passed her. He hoped to go that’s what this was, anyway. The least aggressive thing he had seen Maggie’s wolf ever do was actively stop growling at him when they met on main street. And even _that_ had been more ‘lack of overt violence’ than outright friendliness. The wolf reminded him of Barnes, in that way. Violence hiding fear.

That’s why he wasn’t surprised to find the ex-winter-soldier at the bottom level of the compound, arms held tensely at his sides while he watched the werewolf burning off energy through the glass door. “You know,” Tony said, openly unhappy with the man, “I think I remember specifically telling you to stay away from my new guest.”

“She found me.” Barnes replied tersely, his gaze never wavering. After another beat of silence, he continued talking. “You didn’t tell me why.”

“Big angry veteran who goes full rampage mode at the slightest provocation, nervous woman who turns into a giant bloodthirsty wolf on a hair trigger… I  _ figured  _ it was a bad combination.” He paused. “How the hell did she even get out there? She’s not cleared to leave the compound.”

“I let her.”

“You what?”

Barnes shrugged, eyes dark and inscrutable as always. “She said she wanted to leave, but she couldn’t. I don’t... like it, when people can’t do what they want to.”

The scolding that Tony was building up in his throat withered away. He could hardly blame Barnes for that. Not after all he’d been through. Even though Tony’s work room and Barnes’ compound apartment were eight doors apart, he could still sometimes hear him waking himself up from his nightmares with tortured, terrified screams. Occasionally, rapid footsteps in the hallway would follow: boy wonder Captain America rushing over to check on his brainwashed best friend.

Barnes didn’t like to talk about the dreams, so Tony never mentioned it. But he always left extra coffee in the pot on those mornings.

“As much as I’d  _ love  _ to stay and chit chat about whatever is going on in that dark little head of yours, I have a dog to train.” Tony said. “I should be fine, I’ve saved the world several times over. But, uh, keep that big robot arm of yours ready. You never know.”

With a hand on the handle, Tony shoved the door open and stepped out under the eve of the building and into the pouring rain, ignoring the voice in his head chanting  _ this is stupid, this is stupid, this is incredibly stupid _ . Mags was a good kid. She wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. But Tony idly rubbed the button on his wristwatch that would summon three FRIDAY-piloted suits, just in case. The sound cannon would buy him enough time for them to get there. 

“Maggie!” He called into the rain. The hulking wolf, dripping wet with summer rain, was a blip at the other end of the field by the tree-line. She stopped her pacing, and stared. He couldn’t even see her eyes at this distance: just the silhouette changing as her head turned to look at him, right as another wave of thunder rolled over the compound. 

There were a few tense, nervous seconds. Then the wolf started slowly walking right in his direction with unhurried, loping strides. Even as her whole body smoothly moved and undulated in time with her steps, her head stayed level, locked on him. Focused. Tony couldn’t help but compare it to the walk of a hunting lioness. 

Maggie’s wolf broke into a trot. 

Without warning, Barnes was beside him, pulling off his jacket to give his arms complete free range of movement. Tony groaned in the back of his throat and turned to him. “I said  _ backup _ , Barnes.  _ Backup _ . Not ‘make me look like we’re getting ready to defend our fucking territory’. Jesus.” 

Barnes said nothing in reply. Drops of rain trickled down his face and across his shoulders. 

The wolf seemed taken aback by the presence of Barnes: her trot slowed to a walk, then a halt. She was thirty feet away from them now, and as still as a statue. It was a distance that could very easily be closed in less than a second, if she got angry.

“I don’t know if you can even understand me.” Tony said in a loud and resigned tone. The more he thought about this, the more he was worried he was going to have to brute-force the mutant to sleep. “I hope for your sake, you can. Or that you at least get the gist of what I’m saying.”

The wolf braced her front legs and shook her head and neck, drops of water spraying everywhere. 

“We need you back, Maggie. You’re scaring the desk jockeys in HQ. And I know, I know, you’re probably… upset, with yourself. Angry that you weren’t in control enough to stop this from happening so soon. But it’s okay. I’m not mad, swear to god.”

Barnes side-eyed the billionaire. Not much rattled the man: he’d backtalked actual gods and cracked jokes while snapping Ultron’s robots in half. He could tell that this, though, was scaring him. Standing on his home turf, alone, confronting not a threat to the human race, but a friend who was out of control. A friend he could tell he didn’t want to hurt. 

“C’mon kid. Please.” Tony said, tilting his head up pleadingly. There wasn't a trace of that well-known cocky billionaire left in his voice.

The wolf started hesitantly stepping forward, and Barnes instinctively readied up. He could feel the deep-rooted training screaming in the back of his mind, ringing every alarm bell he had, desperately trying to notify him of the  _ massive threat  _ standing in front of him. It took everything he had to stand down. When everything used to be your enemy, it was hard to give anything even the chance to be a friend.

Tony and the wolf stood toe to toe now, and Jesus, Tony could smell the stink of wet fur and canine breath. The air between them felt like liquid iron, pulsating and dangerous and electrically charged. Maggie’s wolf stared like her eyes were burning beacons, flickering her gaze from Tony, to Barnes, and finally back to the open grassy area behind her that she had just been sprinting through. The air shifted. The wolf finally conceded. With an exhale of breath that made her massive sides deflate, and ruffled Tony’s hair, her form started morphing inwards. 

Tony Stark and Bucky Barnes watched with amazement as fur seemed to press in on itself, melting into pale skin and small human features. After only a second, there was nothing left but a small human woman crouched in the rain, ankle-deep in mud. 

* * *

I opened my eyes, already shivering, and immediately pulled my hands away from their supporting positions on the muddy ground to wrap them around myself. “Wh…” I said, teeth chattering as the cool rain wicked warmth away from my body. “T- Tony?”

A sodden towel found its way around my body, and a warm, rain-damp hand helped me to my feet. 

“If this keeps happening, I’m gonna start putting those ruined pairs of sweats on your tab.”

My eyes widened when I realized what he meant. My scattered, dizzy brain took in the shreds of soaked grey fabric by the door, and the absolutely destroyed and torn-up lawn behind me. “Tony, I am so,  _ so  _ sorry, I-”

Tony waved his hand. “Kidding. I was kidding.” He jerked his head towards the door. “Let’s just get you inside, alright?”

I was all too eager to comply, holding the towel tight and scurrying towards the building. My shoulder knocked against someone and I staggered, blinking rainwater out of my still-blurry eyes. I couldn’t even put my thoughts together enough to understand what was happening: normally my brain had some catchup time during sleep after shifting.

Barnes pointedly stepped backwards, out of my way. “Sorry.” He muttered.

“Yeah, great going.” Tony said as he helped me inside. There was real anger in his voice, and I suspected it wasn't just for shoulder-checking me.

As I was helped into a smaller lounge with an electric fireplace, the rainstorm doubled down in force on the compound, roaring. Thunder crashed outside. And for the first time in a  _ long  _ time, my head wasn’t just quiet. It felt almost empty, like I was the only person inside of it. I’d never let the wolf out to run like that before: in the past it was always just me, locked in my tiny one-bedroom apartment with barely enough space to stride across. 

“Just, uh. Sit there, I’ll go steal something from Natasha’s room. She never uses it anyway.” Tony said awkwardly, making a beeline out of the room. 

I wrung out my hair onto the towel surrounding me with shaky, damp hands, and flicked on the switch for the fireplace. The flames crackled to life and I shuffled the padded seat I was on a few inches closer to it. 

“Tony? Babe?” A voice was coming down from the hallway kitty-corner to the one Tony had just disappeared into. With it came the sound of high-heels. I braced for a new person: right now, I would rather curl up in a hold underground than have someone see me in this messy, unprofessional state. 

“Tony? They didn’t have any of the Latvian grey ties you like in stock, so I just got pearl grey inst-” A woman strode into the room and stopped short when she saw me, eyes bugging out of her head. She looked like someone who had just walked off the cover of a business magazine, all pressed shirt lines and elegant stilettos. Her hair was a light ginger and her lipstick was red as rubies, and in each hand she clutched two large paper shopping bags. “Oh god.” She said, looking straight at me. “Not again.”

I winced. I knew what I looked like: stringy hair, covered in mud, dark circles under my eyes and shivering from the warmth the rain had stolen from me. 

“I told him, I  _ told  _ him to stop using interns to test his latest projects. But did he listen to me? Of course not.” The woman very forcefully set down the bags and clicked over to me, crouching beside my chair and putting a hand on my knee. Her facial features were etched with concern. “What did he do, honey? Was it one of his trials on temporal displacement grenades? God, is that why you’re soaked? Did he displace you outside?” Her wide eyes got even bigger and, if possible, even angrier. “Did he calibrate it so incorrectly he didn’t teleport your  _ clothes  _ with you?!” She looked like she was ready to wring someone’s neck. 

It would have been a hilarious situation if I wasn’t so tired and so out of it. I cleared my throat, quickly clarifying before the woman could hunt down and slay the arrogant billionaire. “No, no. It’s not like that. I’m Maggie? Tony’s, uh… charity case, I guess.”

“Maggie…” The woman mulled over. “Oh.  _ Oh _ . Right. With the…” She mimed snarling teeth and tightened her free hand in the facsimile of a clawed paw. As I nodded, she paused to survey my current state. “If you don’t mind me asking, just what the hell happened to you?”

I ducked my head, choosing to look at the fireplace instead of in the woman’s mossy green eyes. Her kindness and understanding was almost more uncomfortable than Barnes’ stoic silence. “I lost control.” I said simply. “Even when I… when I  _ promised  _ Mr. Stark I wouldn’t. I did.” The flames, with their orange and red hues, did little to warm me. I felt cold, deep inside my chest. Bitterly disappointed. I’d had longer accident-free streaks living in the middle of  _ New York _ for god’s sake: what did it say about me that I lost my cool only a few hours in at the compound?

A pair of footsteps stopped at the entrance of the mini lounge. “Pepper.” Tony said. “I see you’ve already met Maggie.” He smiled at me tightly, tossing me a folded set of clothes. “Go pop that on. Bathroom’s around the corner. Then we’ll get back to doing some more imaging tests.”

“Shouldn’t we call it quits today?” I asked weakly.  _ I could have hurt you. Killed you _ . The words stayed on my tongue, bitter and repugnant. 

“Nice try. You’re not getting out of another round trip through the CT scanner  _ that  _ easily.” 

I slunk around the corner and locked myself in the lavish public bathroom, throwing on the yoga pants and the sweatshirt that read ‘let’s get married’ with the cartoonish picture of a large black widow spider below it, saliva dripping from her jaws. One of the light fixtures in the far corner was permanently flickering: I didn’t know why, but it made me want to cry. I resisted the urge to slide back down against the wall and curl in on myself. I didn’t want to be home: that would only mean I had nobody to help me when the wolf came. But I also didn’t want to be  _ here _ , surrounded by people looking down on me and treating me like some sort of new and scary exotic pet. And the worst part of it all? I couldn’t tell what was more mortifying: knowing everyone who looked at me saw the wolf inside instead of the woman, or the fact that I kept  _ fucking losing my clothes _ . 

It didn’t even register that I was crying until a teardrop hit the floor with a little watery  _ plink _ . I furiously rubbed at my red eyes with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, straightened my shoulders, and left the bathroom. Stark  _ still  _ hadn’t given me any shoes. My bare footsteps were silent on the floor. 

“...know what you’re doing?” Pepper’s voice filtered in from around the corner, hushed and quiet. Against my better judgement I froze and leaned against the wall to eavesdrop. 

“You think anyone else is gonna help her? When she has so little control?” Tony replied. Pepper started to respond but he stopped her. “Here, just- here. Look at this. Remember this?”

There was the sound of a video clip playing. I knew exactly what it was, just from the audio: crunching asphalt, the chatter of Avenger intercoms… and a low, ambient snarling. Tony Stark circa 2014 was talking, telling the wolf to calm down, that they weren’t here to hurt it. He told Barton to put the bow down, and Barton told him to shove it. 

“Oh my god.” Pepper gasped softly in the other room. “It- she’s  _ huge _ .”

“And wild.” Tony concluded. The video soundtrack shut off. “Listen, I  _ know  _ I should have told you more, I know. I’m sorry.” There was the sound of rustling fabric, and Pepper’s sigh muffled by Tony’s shirt. “Pepper. Based on what little data I’ve been feeding to Banner- she’s getting worse. The resistant neural pathways in her brain are weak, weaker than I thought they were. If I had just slapped a band aid on this problem and sent it back out into the world, we’d have dozens of dead New Yorkers and an undocumented mutant scandal on our hands by the end of the week. At least here, we can contain her safely: we basically have a small army on payroll.”

“You always were a problem-solver, weren’t you?” Pepper replied. “Never could resist a challenge.”

Her words fell on my deaf ears. Getting worse. It’s what Tony said. I steadied myself on the wall as bile rose in the back of my throat. The floor was starting to tilt.  _ Getting worse _ ?  _ It’s always been hard. It’s ALWAYS been hard. Getting worse. It can GET worse _ ?

_ I am not in control _ . 

The revelation hit me like a train. I could hear Pepper and Tony continuing to talk around the corner, but it sounded like everything was underwater, my heart beating so loud in my ears it drowned everything else out. Getting worse. He said it like maybe next time, I just wouldn’t be able to resist at all. He said it like maybe someday soon I’d just become a slave to the whims of the parasite inside of me. 

I had to breathe. Deep and in through my nose, slow and out through my mouth.  _ It’s called grounding _ , is what my mom had said when she was teaching me it at age 15,  _ it keeps you connected with yourself, keeps you from floating away _ . I used to float away a lot, after my first change. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Center myself. Pretend that I’m not just a collection of shards being held together in a bloodied, cut-raw hand. Pretend, just like I always do, that I’m fine, at least for the next few moments. _I can get through the next few moments._

“Kid?” Tony said loudly. “You done in there?”

  
I rounded the corner into the lounge, and smiled at the both of them. “Yup. Now let’s go get those scans over with.”


End file.
